Third party tools are a game design failing in a multi-platform game

[Sebazy]

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A few responses:

1) Agreed.

2) I think trying to tie this situation to WoW is the wrong take. IMHO it's much more like the Windower situation that FFXI faced where the QoL improvements on offer were just impossible to ignore and it only ever improved whereas the official client just sat around being stagnant and stuck in the past. Windower certainly had plenty of shady things of it's own on offer, but it's core functionality was a revelation. It ballooned into what it eventually became because SE tried to ignore what it bought to the table.

3) Eeehhhhh, this is a point with no correct answer that everyone will be happy with. Would console players be playing at the same level without strats and optimisations derived from data harvested in the PC client? Would console players be able to go into an Ultimate blind and clear it without external tools such as fftoolbox, existing guides, YouTube videos, externally captured video for analysis etc? I highly doubt it would happen in any kind of sensible timeframe.

4) He's not wrong but Yoshida's not outright lying either, as ever the real story is somewhere in the middle. Gordias forced Yoshida to give some insight on their internal processes, what went wrong with that tier in particular (Testing phase by phase with cooldowns being reset basically) and what they planned to change to fix it (Test fights in their entirety, rather than phase by phase). In short, I don't think Yoshida is outright lying claiming that it's cleared internally, but as an ex Bullfrog/EA developer, I know exactly how QA works at these sorts of large studios and they are absolutely not getting QA teams that are capable of clearing something like DSR in the manner that a top fight raid team does. They will work their way through it to make sure things work sure, but they won't be doing it in the same manner as we do, they'll have various degrees of inflated ilvl or outright godmode to do so.

5) I mean he's not wrong. These mods really should be part of the discussion to emphasise how important it is that SE makes the right judgement call at the end of all of this. Actively pursuing all of these mods and such by the way of anti cheat and/or file checks would be devastating to all areas of this games community.

6) FF14 isn't like Minecraft or Terraria because the developers don't have the initiative to allow their own player base to help improve their own game for them. I don't think it's a dumb take at all. Sure there's stuff that crosses the line and takes things way too far, but completely ignoring the good because of the bad is self defeating.